The Lie (2 page)

I fucking loved her
like no guy has ever loved a girl. I know every guy has thought that about some girl, and that’s exactly why I’m saying it. I’m also saying it because it was true.

We met about two weeks into our freshman year at SMU. I was majoring in biological sciences with the intent of getting into a good med school and she was getting a bachelor’s degree in elementary education—she wanted to be a teacher. That seemed so sweet to me at the time. She was actually going to college to learn how to be a good teacher. I had a few teachers I liked along the way, but I’ll never forget overhearing Mr. Campbell, my high school history teacher, telling Mrs. Baude, my high school calculus teacher, that he started teaching because it was the only job he could get and twenty-five years later it was the only job he could keep. I always kind of figured that’s how most teachers became teachers, but she was actively pursuing the career. It was almost noble.

Classes had just barely started. I got a few syllabi, but I still hadn’t even gone to some first classes yet because the hadn’t been held. I was sitting in my dorm room in McElvaney, talking to my roommate, Dave, about some stupid bullshit like how he couldn’t wait to get back home for Christmas so he could get some of his mom’s cooking or some other inconsequential crap. Actually, maybe he was talking about which frats he wanted to try to get into the following semester. I had no interest in joining a frat, which he tried to convince me was the biggest mistake I would ever make. Later I found out he was a born-again Christian, and when he found out I didn’t go to church or subscribe to any religion he tried to convince me that burning in hell was almost as big a mistake as not getting into a frat. Anyway, whatever we were talking about got interrupted when we both heard a thud followed by some whimpering in the hallway outside our door. We went out to see what in the hell was going on and there was Heather. She was shit-faced beyond recognition.

Heather had apparently been too drunk to walk and had used her friend as a human crutch as they both stumbled back to McElvaney from whatever party they were at. Once they were in the hallway, her friend passed out, they both fell down, and Heather smashed her head against the wall. She had a small cut on her forehead and she was kind of crying or moaning—just making weird low noises, really. I remember genuinely feeling bad for her.

I asked her if she was okay and she said, “I need to lay down, I think.”

She was hot as hell, there’s no question about that. But there was something about her, something beyond just looking good, that attracted me to her almost immediately. I had a few girlfriends in high school I thought were cute or whatever, but not like this. I know it’s gay, but it was her eyes or something. I don’t know. Maybe it was just seeing her completely out-of-control drunk, too. But there was some kind of immediate attraction that wasn’t like anything I’d ever felt. So, seeing a hot chick in need of aid, I did what any normal guy would have done. Actually I did what any pussy-ass chump would have done. I helped her up and asked if I could take her back to her room, with no intention of making any kind of move on her.

She said, “What floor are we on?”

I said, “Third.”

“I think my room is on two. I can’t really walk anymore. Where’s your room?”

I said, “Right here.”

As Heather went into my room I tried to get her friend up off the floor, but when I reached down and touched her arm she started yelling, “Get your fucking hands off me, asshole.” Then she launched a halfhearted punch at my balls that kind of glanced off my thigh. I looked back to Heather to see if she was going to offer me some help in wrangling her friend, but she was already in my room, on my bed. Not wanting to risk another nut-shot, I just left her friend there, assuming she’d sober up and find her way back to her room.

I essentially could have done anything I wanted to Heather that night, but it didn’t even cross my mind. I took off her shoes, went down the hall and ran some warm water over a washrag in the bathroom, came back, cleaned the blood off her forehead, put a Band-Aid on the cut, pulled up the covers, and—get this shit—I went to sleep on the fucking floor so she’d be more comfortable.

I remember Dave just pretending to go to sleep. At the time I really didn’t know why, but after I found out about how Christian he was I thought it might have had something to do with breaking some rule against God or something by having a girl in our room. Who knows? He was a weird guy.

The next morning was awkward at best. Heather woke up before I did. She nudged me and then we introduced ourselves.

She said something like, “Hi. I’m Heather.”

I said something like, “I’m Kyle.”

“Did we…I hate having to actually ask this, but did we have sex last night?”

“No.”

“Oh, I thought we…Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Positive. I think I would have remembered.”

“I thought we were both drunk, though. I just want to make sure in case we didn’t use any protection, you know, so I can get a morning-after pill.”

This was our first official conversation and she was basically telling me that she was so slutty that standard operations for her involved being unable to remember having sex with a guy five hours after his dick was in her followed by eating morning-after pills like they were daily vitamins and this didn’t even tip me off at all that this chick was bad fucking news.

I said, “You were pretty out of it, but I was completely sober.”

“Wait, you’re not the guy I met at Tammy’s party last night?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Again, concrete confirmation that she was a fucking slut of the highest order. Again, completely fucking ignored by myself.

“So how did I get here exactly?”

“I heard you fall in the hall outside, so I went out to see if you were okay and then you just kind of came in my room and passed out in my bed.”

She reached up and touched her head, felt the Band-Aid, then said, “Oh, oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

“I tried to take you back to your room, but you asked to stay here. So I put a Band-Aid over your cut and let you have the bed.”

“And you slept on the floor all night?”

“Yeah.”

And it was right at that moment that she gave me this look. It’s the only time a girl has ever looked at me like that. Kind of sad and sweet at the same time, like I had done something for her that no guy had ever even approached doing for her—almost like she expected me to have raped her or something, and because I didn’t it made some deeper connection with her. At the time I thought the look was about all of those things, about her having some real feelings for me. But now, after all the shit that’s happened, I realize that look, the look that essentially started all of this crap, was actually just pity. Nothing more. She thought I was pathetic because I didn’t try to fuck her that night. And no matter what words were said and what things were done in the years that followed, she could never truly love me because she could never respect a guy who didn’t take advantage of her.

After the look she said, “Oh my God, where’s Annie?”

“Your friend?”

“Yeah, where is she?”

“She was passed out in the hall last time I saw her.”

“Did you wake her up?”

“I tried but she was pretty drunk. She just asked me to leave her there so I did.”

“Oh my God.”

She got up out of my bed and opened my dorm room door to find Annie still passed out in the same spot, but now with some of her own puke dried on the front of her shirt.

She said, “Thank God she’s okay.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, thanks for, you know, helping me last night.”

I was too anxious to hold back. “Maybe we could go do something sometime.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. My roommate and I are just meeting a lot of people, you know, before we rush next semester, so…We’ll probably be pretty busy, but I’m sure we’ll run into each other again.”

“Okay, cool.”

“So…I guess I should probably be getting Annie back and everything, but really, thanks again.”

And that was pretty much it. She left my room and scraped up Annie off the ground. I thought I might see her in passing or something, but I had already chalked up our encounter to what I hoped would be a long string of strange interactions with hot chicks in my dorm.

When she left I realized my roommate, Dave, was awake the whole time and was witness to my entire interaction with Heather. He said something like, “Good try, man. Just remember, if Christ wants something to happen it will, but it will happen in his time,” which was my first real taste of the born-again-flavored shit pie he was going to force-feed down my throat every day of our freshman year.

Even though I was the one
who hit my head on the wall and got injured, Annie was way worse than me. She didn’t really wake up for like a long time and when I finally got her to stumble back to our room, she was still drunk. I had to call the RA because she was so bad. The RA looked at her and I guess he had seen this kind of thing before because he was like, “She has alcohol poisoning,” without even batting an eye. Annie had to go to the hospital and everything and get her stomach pumped and an IV and it was just really bad, but she ended up being okay, I mean after her parents calmed down.

The entire time she was at the hospital I just stayed in our room, and I know it sounds really corny, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about Kyle. I know he’s a dick, but I didn’t know it then and I mean how sweet was it that he took me into his room and put a Band-Aid on my cut? Seriously? I mean no guy does that. Or if they do it’s because they’re trying to sleep with you, or if they’ve already slept with you, it’s because they’re trying to have a threesome with you and your best friend or some weird thing like that. My first boyfriend in high school did things like that, but only because he didn’t know any better, I think. As soon as we started having sex, he became a real prick. I got the feeling Kyle did it because he was like a really nice guy. It was kind of refreshing, I guess, at first anyway.

I mean, I figured we’d probably never go out or anything. Even from just that one night I could tell he was kind of a little nerdy and not like a good nerdy. Sometimes nerdy guys can be totally hot. He wasn’t like that. He was like real nerdy—like the kind of nerdy that girls would laugh at if they knew we were dating. The kind of nerdy that might keep me out of my top sorority choices when I rushed the next semester.

I guess I can’t say I remember much from the next few weeks because, honestly, I was completely trashed for most of it. It was just a lot of parties and a lot of hooking up with random guys who were going to be rushing—trying to figure out which ones might make good boyfriends, trying to figure out which ones might or might not make good fiancé material a few years down the road. Pretty basic, I guess.

There was actually one time, maybe like three days after the thing with Kyle, when I was at a party being thrown by Gabe Childress at his parents’ house in Highland Park. Pretty much every guy there was sure he was going to rush SAE or Pike so it was fun and there was just so much coke and E that I couldn’t really say no and I ended up in a bedroom with this complete asshole named Collin Davis. At the time I didn’t know what an asshole he was and I was rolling, so Annie (fresh out of the hospital for alcohol poisoning) and me ended up giving him like a double blowjob. I regret doing it now, but at the time it was pretty fun. It wasn’t the first time I had kissed a girl or anything but it was the first time I had done anything like that with a guy in the room.

Even before I really got to know Collin, I can remember thinking he was a loser. The whole time Annie and I were blowing him he kept saying, “Good girls, good girls,” like we were fucking dogs or something. If I hadn’t been on drugs I seriously would have like laughed in his face. The weirdest part about that thing with Collin is, I was thinking about Kyle the whole time I was doing it—you know, like wondering if Kyle would be saying, “Good girls, good girls.” Then I remember thinking he probably hadn’t even had a blowjob from one girl, let alone two. Then I started wondering what his high school girlfriend was like, or if he even had one. She was probably a band nerd if he did. Then I think I started thinking about his dick and what it might look like, and then Collin tried to cum on our faces, but totally missed and ended up just getting semen on his own pants. I wish Annie or me would have been together enough to say, “Good boy,” back to him, but, like I said, we were really, really high so…

Now that I’m thinking about it, I actually did run into Kyle again pretty soon after we first met. I guess I didn’t run into him, I just saw him walking between Boaz Hall and the Crow Building. The only reason I remember it is because he was walking with Brett Keller, and I was like, “How is that nerdy guy friends with Brett?”

Even though it was just a few weeks into our freshman year, pretty much every girl on campus knew who Brett Keller was. Probably one of the top ten hottest guys on campus and easily in the top five richest guys on campus, maybe the richest—he probably was. A lot of girls also said he had a huge dick, which was never my thing, but it did make him seem more important somehow—like if you hooked up with him, you were part of the “I had sex with Brett Keller and lived to tell about it” club.

As corny as it may sound, the fact that I saw Kyle hanging out with Brett made me think he might not be that bad. I mean if he was cool enough to be friends with Brett, then he was probably at least slightly cool himself. And even if he wasn’t, I remember thinking that if we became friends or started hooking up or something, there might be a chance for me to hang out with Brett later and then maybe Brett would be into me.

I knew it was a long shot, but it did get me thinking that it might be worth my time to at least pretend to be interested in Kyle. Seriously, at the time I thought, worst-case scenario—I end up giving Kyle a few blowjobs before I find out I have no shot with Brett. Best-case scenario—I end up giving Kyle a few blowjobs before Brett realizes he wants to steal me from Kyle.